


catoptromancy

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Series: mirror, mirror [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Gen, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 15:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8494447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: Neil Josten dyes his hair the color of mud in a hotel bathroom outside of Wichita. Nathaniel Wesninski sneers at him from the mirror.





	

**Author's Note:**

> for a prompt on tumblr:
> 
> Imagine there's a parellel universe beyond any mirror, and that every mirror image is actually their own person, though there are very few people who are aware of it. Even fewer than can interact with this other world. In this life, Aaron is a single child, and he doesn't notice the blank look with which his reflection stares back at him. In this life, Neil falls for Aaron's mirror image instead.

Neil Josten dyes his hair the color of mud in a hotel bathroom outside of Wichita. Nathaniel Wesninski sneers at him from the mirror.

“It won’t help.” Nathaniel has eyes the color of ice and hair the color of fire, and when he glares around the toothbrush in his mouth he looks exactly like their father. “They’re going to find us.”

Find _you_ , he means. There’s nothing of Nathaniel left for them to find.

“Leave me alone.” Neil has perfected the art of looking _around_ his reflection, at keeping his attention trained away from the face that stares back at him. He checks his roots from the corner of his gaze, watches his back from the peripheral. He looks in the mirror and behind the details, ignoring Nathaniel. “Go bother someone else.”

“There is no one else,” Nathaniel reminds him bitterly. “There’s only you.”

* * *

Neil lowers the screen over the window before the engines even start up, but Nathaniel continues his lecture in the smudged reflection of the terminal glass in South Carolina. “What are you doing,” and his eyes are wide with fear. “Neil, _what are you doing_?”

He looks like their father and sounds like their mother, and Neil wishes all three of them would stay dead.

* * *

Kevin Day meets him at the curb.

He hasn’t recognized Neil, not yet, but Neil recognized him instantly in the dark of the locker room (Nathaniel recognized him too, going pale and silent and drawing himself as small as possible. Later, back in the house they so rarely inhabit, he slammed his fists raw on the glass of the mirror and screamed at Neil to run.) Kevin hasn’t changed much in nine years, not like Neil has. The main difference is the way he doesn’t hold himself like something holy; he carries himself with the weariness of a man who once worshipped at his own altar.

Aaron Minyard waits at the curb, too.

(Kevin hasn’t changed much in nine years; he never goes anywhere alone.)

Aaron had been in the locker room in Millport, too - he hadn’t spoken to Neil then. He doesn’t speak to him now, either. Not in the car, not at the apartment, not on either of the too-long elevator rides where Nathaniel cowers in the farthest corner. He stands like a statue at Kevin’s side, silent and glaring, and raises an eyebrow like a question mark when Neil locks eyes with suspicious hazel in the shine of the elevator door.

The reflection stares back, long after Aaron has gone.

* * *

The next time he catches the eye of Aaron’s reflection it’s in the rear view mirror of the car as it thunders down the road to Columbia. Neil is in the back, fourteen inches and twenty-two lifetimes of space between him and Kevin, and all he can see is the flash of hazel and an accusing voice. “Brown is not your real color,” he says.

Nathaniel goes cold and pale against the condensation of the window.

“I wear colored contacts,” Neil says, because there’s no harm in confirming what Aaron already knows.

In the passenger seat, Nicky whirls around with a smile that sets both Neil and Nathaniel on edge - it’s too wide, too open. It leaves too much space for secrets to spill out. “You do?” His surprise is not a lie.

Neil realizes his mistake when Aaron turns his head to ask Nicky about the exit and the eyes in the mirror stay fixed on his.

* * *

The first time he showers at the court, he waits until everyone has gone. There’s a familiarity to the quiet of the deserted bathroom, the harshness of false daylight from the fluorescent lighting and the echo of footsteps - his own - against the tile. It feels like old motels and gas stations. Like running. It’s a safe enough feeling that he crosses to the nearest mirror to share it with Nathaniel.

He finds Aaron instead.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he yelps, and whirls to face an empty room. “ ** _Fuck_**.”

Aaron’s reflection squares its shoulders like it’s preparing for a fight. “You’re not supposed to see me,” and the impossibility of it has laughter bubbling in his throat - he’s not supposed to see him because he’s _not supposed to be here._ Neil accepts Nathaniel’s presence through the resignation of time and the necessity of proximity, but this is-

This is-

This is Aaron’s reflection and Aaron nowhere to be found. This is something else entirely.

“Yeah, well, looks like neither of us is acting like we’re supposed to.” Movement at the corner of his vision, past the confines of what he allows himself to see, is the familiar discomfort of Nathaniel lurking. He keeps to the borders, the shadows, trying to remain unseen. “Go away, Aaron.”

“Andrew.” He looks annoyed to have even given that small bit away, but it’s the only thing that keeps Neil from leaving.

The first time it happened, it was their first night on the run and the movement in the mirror had terrified him into throwing up whatever he had kept down over the day - mostly bile. He hadn’t told his mother. It was months before they’d slowed down long enough for Neil to escape to a library. He’d felt ridiculous, asking for the folklore section to look up mirrors, and more so after the first reference to ‘windows to the spirit world.’ Less so when the years went by and Nathaniel became more and more comfortable making himself known.“Multiple personalities? Near death experience?” He considers what he knows of the Foxes, of where they come from. “Foster care?”

“Fuck you.”

It’s as good as a yes. “Goodbye, Andrew.”

Smearing the mirror with hand soap might be childish, but it gets the job done. Neil is finally alone.

* * *

From what he’s pieced together (as much as he’s allowed himself to think about it), mirrors are less a window to the spirit world and more a window to the waiting room of the spirit world. The space between life and death, this world and whatever comes after. Limbo, some sources call it. 

They think that Nathaniel might be an exception - he hasn’t died, simply ceased to exist. Neil moves on with the life Nathaniel was evicted from, and Nathaniel-

Well, no one lives forever.

* * *

Neil borrows Matt’s laptop and his desk lamp and sets up in the corner, light shining directly on the screen - it makes it almost impossible to read the text, but completely impossible to see a reflection.

He doesn’t have a lot to go on - a name, first and last, and another, only first. A location, sure, but the vague mentions throughout high school don’t go back further than that. By the time he’s moved on to family connections, he’s got countless more questions than answers.

It takes four hours before he finds the article about the crash.

Tilda Hemmick, thirty-six, killed on impact as her car struck the concrete median at eighty-seven miles an hour, is survived by her son Aaron, sixteen. Her son Andrew, also sixteen, taken by helicopter to Richland in grave condition. No further details.

There’s no mention of Andrew’s death. There’s no mention of him leaving the hospital either.

Neil supposes that ‘caught between life and death’ is as accurate a description of a coma as one can get.

* * *

Andrew is probably the most abrasive human being that Neil has ever met. Every moment he breaks away from Aaron to bother Neil, Neil feels like he might put a fist through whatever reflective surfaces he’s found himself in.

(They’re also the only moments he feels like he might be a real person. Andrew knows Nathaniel, but he also knows Neil. Sometimes Neil thinks Andrew might be the only one who makes the distinction between them.)

* * *

It’s not a problem.

And then it is.

“People in your brother’s condition,” Riko smiles the threat around a glass of flat soda, leaning back in the black and crimson draped chairs of the banquet. Two seats to Neil’s right, he sees the way the blood suddenly drops out of Aaron’s face, turning his skin the same too-white of his hair. “Can deteriorate so quickly.” Lips purse in feigned concern and Riko shakes his head, tsking lightly.

“Leave him alone,” Aaron growls, but his voice is soft. He sounds like someone much younger (sixteen, the article said), much frailer; Neil reaches across Kevin’s back to tangle his fingertips in Aaron’s sleeve.

The gesture doesn’t go unnoticed; Neil hadn’t intended it to. “Richland has good doctors, though.” When he moves in for the final blow, it’s not Aaron he aims it at. “The best money can buy,” he sneers at Neil, and the offer of trade goes unspoken.

“I do this,” and Neil lays it out carefully, every point on the table for the Foxes; he wants them to _know_ , wants to have them watching his back like he does on the court. He wants whatever guarantee of return eight witnesses gets him. “I spend the break at Evermore, and Andrew stays out of this.”

Nathaniel rages so hard against the confines of a glass of water that Neil seriously considers it might shatter.

(Andrew does the opposite; he disappears entirely.)

There’s a sharp victory in the cut of Riko’s smile.

* * *

“I never told you,” Aaron catches him on his way out of the tower, bags packed and shoulders set. “Andrew, you - you knew his name. I never told you that.”

There is more than a good chance that Neil is going to die. “No, you didn’t.”

Aaron blinks, and for the first time he doesn’t look like he’s looking for a fight. “Then how-”

“Next time you go see him,” and it’s a guess, really. Aaron misses practice every other Wednesday, and the study group he claims to be at meets far enough off campus that he’s gone the entire afternoon, and well into the evening. Too long for a study group. Just enough time to drive to Columbia and back. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

* * *

Days at Evermore blur together, bleeding into each other and to the many places they slice his skin open. He can’t know for sure, but he thinks it’s been eight days when Andrew’s faded image in the mirror vanishes mid-sentence.

Almost simultaneously, Riko’s cell phone chirps.

“Oh dear,” and the same false concern is in his voice, thick like syrup. It drips across his lips to coat the smile he plasters on behind it. “Oh no.” The click his phone makes as he sets it on the bedside table beside the knife he’s drawn patterns in Neil’s skin with sounds too loud. Too final.

“That was my doctor at Richland,” he croons the words into the open wound of Neil’s back. “Your friend is gone.”

* * *

The first time he sees himself in the mirror after Evermore, he thinks Nathaniel is gone.

It’s his own hand that hovers above the tattoo on his cheek, his own expression of terror. His own skin that burns and bleeds from a hundred different places, his own wrists that ooze raw from refusing to submit. His own eyes the color of ice and hair the color of fire as he reaches out to touch.

Then the reflection twists away from him, flinching from his hand and snapping like a cornered animal, “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” Nathaniel (he’d been Nathaniel again, the entire time in Evermore, and the mirror had gone silent) cowers in the farthest corner of the reflected airport bathroom. “Don’t touch me,” and Neil watches the bandaged hands move to his face, trying to claw the number off, with regret.

Nathaniel didn’t choose this, Neil did.

It’s the first time he’s made the distinction.

* * *

Aaron is waiting for him when he gets back to his otherwise empty dorm room, reclining listless across Neil’s bed. He looks wrung-out and only half-alive, and he’s lost an uncomfortable amount of weight since Neil’s been away.

“I’m sorry,” Neil tells him. For Andrew. For not being enough. For-

Hazel eyes sharpen like the drawing of a knife. “Say that again,” Andrew warns him, voice rusty from disuse, “and I’ll kill you.”


End file.
